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Every Monument Will Fall

A Story of Remembering and Forgetting
By Dan Hicks
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Brief Description
The culture war is over. If you want it to be. It wasn't even a culture war; it was a war on culture. A sustained attack, Dan Hicks argues, in the form of the weaponisation of civic museums, public art, and even universities—and one that has... Read More
Format: Paperback / softback
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Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

The culture war is over. If you want it to be. It wasn't even a culture war; it was a war on culture. A sustained attack, Dan Hicks argues, in the form of the weaponisation of civic museums, public art, and even universities—and one that has a deeper history than you might think.

Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts over art, heritage, memory, and colonialism, Every Monument Will Fall joins the dots between the building of statues, the founding of academic disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, and the warehousing of stolen art and human skulls in museums—including the one in which he is a curator.

Part history, part biography, part excavation, the story runs from the Yorkshire wolds to the Crimean War, from southern Ireland to the frontline of the American Civil War, from the City of London to the University of Oxford—revealing enduring legacies of militarism, slavery, racism, and white supremacy hardwired into the heart of our cultural institutions.

Every Monument Will Fall offers an urgent reappraisal of how we think about culture, and how to find hope, remembrance, and reconciliation in the fragments of an unfinished violent past. Refusing to choose between pulling down every statue, or living in a past that we can never change, the book makes the case for allowing monuments of all kinds to fall once in a while, even those that are hard to see as monuments, rebuilding a memory culture that is in step with our times.

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781804950005

Publisher: Cornerstone

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 30 April 2026

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Penguin (Cornerstone)

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 39.0mm

Width: 128.0mm

Height: 197.0mm

Weight: 406g

Pages: 592

Collections

Arts & Culture Biography & Memoir Dan Hicks Education & Reference History & Archaeology History & Military Non-Fiction Penguin Books Political Biographies

About the Author

Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at Oxford University, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. Dan has written widely on art, archaeology, architecture and anthropology for a variety of journals, magazines and newspapers, ranging from Art Review and Texte Zur Kunst to Architectural Review, Museums Journal and The Guardian. This is his second major authored book. Instagram/Bluesky- @ProfDanHicks

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